I don't consider myself a feminist by any means, but I imagine it's a bit frustrating that a discussion of a male CEO rarely ever involves talking about their looks, yet it's one of the primary topics when discussing female CEO's.

Depends on the market segment, I think. If you are a big customer (think government) looking to have someone support ALL your hardware, IBM is going to bid cheap. But I think if you want an app developed or to buy some iron, they leverage their name and charge big$$.

If only they wouldn't outsource their call centers. I had a conversation last week with someone who learned their English from Agador Spartacus.

Not really. A drop of $1 over a shareprice of $180 isn't a steep drop. In fact, most the market did somewhat fall that day. Looking at the monthly trend however, IBM and Apple are the only ones that have had a significant dip over the last month (google finance on IBM [google.com]).

The GP is saying that their shareprice has sunk heavily due to the appointment of the new CEO who is female. I am saying that their shareprice hasn't dumped since the appointment. I did say that Apple and IBM were the two companies in the bunch that had a bit of a bad spell over the last month.

Lets see. They offshored a number of their tech jobs to people that were not ready for it. They moved hardware production offshore and then were forced to sell teh divisions to the same ppl that were stealing them blind on tech. As it is, I suspect that had Palmisano remained at IBM for another year or two, he would have sold Watson to China.

Sadly, rometty is not much different since she was at the core of the sell offs. The end of IBM was started 10 years ago.

Yep. 10 years ago, my IBM GS position went to Puna, India. I was offered something in Armonk, across the country from where I lived. Took the package, ended the unhappiest 3 years of my professional life, and never looked back. What a miserable, miserable place to work. 7 managers in 3 years.

I worked for IBM watson (via Colorado) back in 1996 ( or was it 94?) when akers was fired and Gerstner was brought in. At the time, we were about to open source OS2. Gerstner killed that idea quickly, which bummed me out. However, while it damaged OS2, IBM was brought back to being a decent a company. I was gone by the time that Palmisano took over and glad that I was. That guy has gutted the company.

If you don't know what they are you don't really exist in a major IT organization.

The point is AIX and DB2 are irrelevant. Anyone still using them is doing so because that's what they've used in the past, they're afraid of change, and they're willing to throw away money on a product that's barely better than the alternatives (and only in ways they'll never take advantage of). OR, they're one of the handful of organizations that actually do need big iron design, and since such organizations are so massive and disparate, the vast majority of people in the organization, even the tech guys

Here we are celebrating another newly minted female CEO of a powerhouse corporation. Meanwhile, with the other side of our mouths, we're constantly bemoaning the fact that most Fortune 500 CEOs are greedy parasites, not to mention the large minority who seem to be sociopaths (and not in a figurative way, either).

It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so proud of women breaking into a job dominated by assholes? Are we assuming that women, unlike the men with whom they successfully competed to get these jobs, will suddenly be nice people when they're the ones on top?
I try to understand when people say the pendulum is still swinging, that women need to make further explicit gains before we can just call it all equal, but I still wish we could reserve admiration and outright celebration for simply people who do good things, rather than continuing to break it out into Men and
Women.

At some point the lauding of the "first female" this and the constant keeping of score has to stop if you want to say you achieved real equality.

She was rewarded because she was the director of the Sales division. It's really common for IBM to grant the CEO badge to whoever led Sales. If an extraterrestrial entity had been in her position, it would have been elected instead.

Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole. One of the standard stereotypes about women is that they're less capable than men in jobs which require making ruthless decisions. Now, personally, I think we'd all be better off if CEOs of both sexes were a lot less ruthless generally -- that is, if they felt some empathy toward and personal responsibility for the welfare of their employees -- but since that's not the world we live in, women have to show that they can perform in these jobs as well as the ste

female primates are way worse than the males; it has to be genetic and it also went on to the humans! females hold on to stuff for a long time and will do nasty things during or finally at the end of that time; won't even be a logical connection, just wham! out from nowhere comes some vindictive thing from the past. at least males deal with it upfront and get over it... that male aggression has a few good sides (just a FEW.)

It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.

Considering what women have had to deal with throughout history, and still continue to deal with today - this is a hell of a good start, if nothing else.

The respect and dialogue can come later. In my experience it won't come

I'm just pointing out that some gendered double standards are better dissolved by raising gender x to the higher standard we once enforced only on gender y, than by simply saying "Gender y, you can act just like those fuckers over there now!"

It's not some straw man; it's an analogy suggesting that maybe we should prefer men learn from the stereotypical woman in business rather than the other way around.

Let me get this straight. So, in order to become a CEO, you don't need to have solid technical knowledge, you just have to be "assertive", "proactive" and all that crap. Am I correct? I don't have a clue about the daily activities of a CEO.

The new CEO is the old head of their services division and oversaw the PriceWaterhouseCoopers takeover in 2002. I think this means that in the coming years, IBM will make a lot more money with a lot less engineers, thanks to their lucrative services business.

If you ask me, it's just a matter of time before the slow death of the server group accelerates into high-speed PC/consumer business style death.

She headed IBM Global Business Services (GBS, sometimes referred to as IBM Global Services or plain services). It has little to do with GSD or the data center fiasco. I wouldnt start selling or shorting stock yet

More on topic, this was more or less expected. The GBS division has become the cash cow, and has grown tremendously in the last 5-7 years.

I'll stop when the companies who try to acquire patents on technology they did not invent stop abusing the patent system, and fanboys stop trying to rewrite history. You don't have to read what I post.

And if David Kappos' recent move is any indication, her next big step is clear: head up the US Patent and Trademark Office when Kappos leaves. I'm guessing that IBM would love this move because there she can better serve IBM's interests against those of the public. Kappos, current USPTO Director, was former IBM vice president and assistant general counsel of "intellectual property [gnu.org]" law. IBM holds the most patents. First-to-file undoubtedly helps large firms like IBM because large firms hire lots of lawyers to file all sorts of patent applications. The more patents IBM holds, the more IBM can cross-license their way out of any threatened patent litigation [progfree.org] by threatening countersuit and then negotiating a patent license.

Didn't we sort the first-to-file vs. first-to-invent issue in a past story? I thought first-to-file was unambiguous and not open to legal challenge. A small time inventor who files first is safe no matter how large a lab/legal department a mega corporation has (assuming, of course, that the invention is valid). Where in the first-to-invent system, a large corporation with a large R&D department would be able to pull up various old/abandoned/half-baked proposals and claim to have invented it first. Of co

be the next Gerstner. I just realized that she was fundamental to the offshoring of the company and the selling of the divisions as much as Palmisano. I predict that IBM is the next ATT and watson will be the next Bell Labs. Gutted for short sales in the market place.

They said their priorities were their customers, their employees and their shareholders. In that order.

Since that time I've seen them outsourcing their employees jobs, and I don't know who are their customers anymore. I've seen them lose some remarkable talent to "early retirement" programs. I've seen them sell division after division that were core components of their culture and their business. At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to a

At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to achieve. Now... I don't. I think they're some sort of storage company.

They still sell more big iron than everyone else put together, and there's still a lot of money in that market. How long this will last, it's hard to say; but people have been predicting the death of the mainframe for decades, and it just keeps on not happening.

The organizations that still use mainframes are up-time fanatics with business models that suffer when a system is unavailable for a few minutes. As a result, they're so conservative that if they were running the country we'd still be under British rule. As long as mainframes work, they'll keep using them rather than risk changing to a different system.

It's not just mainframes... the biggest IBM product we use at wr0k is Netezza (technically not IBM invented, but heck, that's the future of "big databases" right there). Though they should cut their prices in half, or else Greenplum (EMC) will eat their lunch...

You're correct from the technical perspective. But my point is that a CTO of a fortune 500 company would rather spend more money than make changes that could impact uptime. "If it ain't broke, and breaking it would cost you your job, don't fix it"

First, z900 was not an entry level box, z990 was. However, that may not have been available until 2002. More importantly, you can not use GHz as any measure of mainframe speed, because not all models run at full speed.

So, using the correct numbers and comparison between the same type of box, with a single processor running at full speed, we see the following:

Yeah... Ginni was my division boss when I worked at IBM a few years ago. I think I even met her once... she give our department a "major" award with a very "minor" cash bonus attached to it. Under her tenure, half of my department's workload was outsourced to India, China, and Brazil.

So, yeah... don't expect anything other than more of the same from her leadership.

Former IBMer Bob Moffat, who was head of the Systems & Technology Group, was being groomed for the top job. But he got himself involved in an insider trading ring. Not for personal profit, but some careless chit-chat at a dinner party about Sun's finances, which IBM was considering to buy at the time.

So he got canned, and rightly so. If you are smart enough for the top job, you'd better be smart enough to watch what you say. Ginni will be subject to all sorts of scrutiny by the press in he coming m

Made my day when I heard this...thanks!! Missed the news about Moffat at the time. He was the individual who sold our manufacturing plant to a company who had a history of buying factories to get the business, then shutting them down. Day the sale was announced he turned up at an all hands meeting and tried to feed us some crap about how we were like his children who he was letting go to college. Actually he was selling us down the river, plant closed less than 2 years later, a shell of the excellent place